The Plus One: escape with the hottest, laugh-out-loud debut of summer 2018!

Jasper muttered the odd ‘fuck’ and a small pile of empty red cartridges piled up behind him. Bovril, meanwhile, galloped back and forth, fetching pheasants and proudly creating a pile at my feet. Some were still twitching, which made me grimace. Urgh, what was I doing standing in this cold field? All I wanted was to sit down with Jasper and get the interview done.

A whistle blew and Jasper put down his gun. ‘Well, that wasn’t too bad, was it? Must have been sixty or so birds that came out of there.’

Poor things, I wanted to say. ‘Hmm,’ I said instead. ‘How long have you been doing it?’

‘Since I was six.’

‘Six? I was still learning to tell the time when I was six.’

‘Dad started me pretty early. Right, come on. Another drive, then it’s elevenses.’

‘Drive? In a car?’ I was hopeful about warming up.

‘No, no, you appalling townie. That’s what we’re on now. A “drive” is this, standing around in a field waiting for birds to be driven towards us. So, we’ve got one more, then elevenses, then probably another couple, then lunch, then maybe two more drives after that depending on the light.’

The day stretched before me. My fingers had gone white from the cold and my feet were presumably the same colour despite being wrapped in scratchy woollen socks. It would serve Peregrine right if I succumbed to frostbite while shooting in Yorkshire.

Lunch was back in the castle, in a room with the heads of dead animals looking down at us. Stag heads staring glassily out in front of them, snarling fox heads, a zebra head, a warthog head, the head of something else that looked like a deer but had curling horns. I stared at them. You never saw zebra heads on 60 Minute Makeover.

‘We killed the last journalist who came to stay with us,’ said a voice behind me. I turned around. It was the Duke. ‘Only joking,’ he said, before I had the chance to reply.

‘Now, come on, everybody sit,’ he ordered.

I was sitting between a man who was wearing bright yellow socks with his tweed outfit, called Barny, and another guest called Max. Barny, I learned, was actually called Barnaby and he was fifty-first in line to the throne. He didn’t have a job, but lived at the family estate in Gloucestershire and spent his time shooting. When he wasn’t shooting, he told me, he was fishing or horse racing.

‘Oh,’ I said, starting to run out of small talk. He seemed obsessed with killing things. ‘So do you travel much?’

‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘going abroad is ghastly. Apart from the Alps. I go skiing three or four times a year. I’d like to go hunting tigers in India, but they’re making it very tricky to do that these days.’

‘Barny, you can’t say that sort of thing,’ said Max, joining the conversation. ‘Polly, I’m so sorry. Barny is completely appalling, but we’ve all been friends since school and we can’t seem to shake him off.’

‘How rude,’ said Barny. ‘No shooting invitation for you this year, Maximillian.’

‘You see, Polly? Barny blackmails us into being friends with him. Tragic.’

I looked along to Jasper, positioned at the head of the table, with two blondes sitting either side and smiling at him in an adoring fashion. His ideal habitat, I suspected. He’d loosened the collar around his neck and was leaning forwards on the table, telling them some story. He reached for a bottle in front of him and topped up both their glasses while still talking, then put the bottle back and looked down the table at me. He caught my eye and winked. Please, I thought, I’m not that easy.

I turned to Max, sensing if not an ally then at least someone I might be able to hold a conversation with, and asked him about the others. ‘Max,’ I began, ‘who is everyone else here? I mean, obviously, I know about Jasper and his family. But I’m not sure about anyone else. Do you know them all?’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, folding his napkin and putting it on the table.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, just poor you. Having to come to this. Do we all seem totally absurd?’ Max asked.

I wasn’t sure how to answer. ‘No,’ I said after a pause. ‘I’m just trying to gauge who everybody is.’

‘OK, let me talk you through them all. So, next to Jasper’s father is Willy Naseby-Dawson, she’s…’

I looked at the blonde girl again. ‘Why’s she called Willy if she’s a girl?’

‘Short for Wilhelmina. She’s from a German family, she’s Barny’s wife. Poor thing. And then on her other side is Archie Spiffington, who’s married to the girl Barny’s talking to now, Jessica. They got married last year because she was pregnant – her father was very upset at that and insisted on them getting hitched. Her family’s disgustingly rich. Her great-great-grandfather invented the railway or something. Anyway, big wedding in London, then six months later along comes their son Ludo, who’s now about seven months, I think. I’m the godfather.’

‘Oh, sweet, where’s Ludo?’

‘No idea, with the nanny in London probably. And then, on Jessica’s other side is Seb – Sebastian, Lord Ullswater. He’s a fairly dubious character who used to be in the Army and now sells weapons to anyone who’ll buy them. And he’s married to that girl on the other side of Jasper, the girl on my right, who’s called Muffy.’

‘And what about you?’ I asked him.

‘What do you mean, what about me?’

‘Are you married?’

Max threw his head back and laughed. ‘I’m gay, my darling. Can you not tell because I’m wearing such manly trousers?’

‘Oh, right,’ I said, blushing. ‘Although, you could still get married.’

‘Yes, that’s true,’ he said, nodding.

‘Have you got a boyfriend?’

‘No. Not terribly good with boyfriends.’

‘Max,’ said Barny, from my other side. ‘None of us want to hear about your love life over pudding.’

‘I wish there was one, Barny, old boy. But it’s been slow-going of late.’

‘You should meet my flatmate, Joe,’ I said to Max. ‘You’re just his type.’

‘Oh really? What’s his type?’

‘Well, actually, quite wide ranging, I’d say. But dark, handsome and funny. And you’re all of those.’

‘Right,’ bellowed the Duke from the other end of the room, slamming his fists down on the table. ‘Finish up your pudding and let’s get going.’

‘Come on then,’ Max said to me. Then he called down the table, ‘Jasper, I’m stealing Polly to stand with me this afternoon. Violet, why don’t you go with your brother? I need to talk to Polly about her flatmate.’

Jasper’s sister. I’d barely noticed the woman sitting three to my left. She seemed much quieter than her talkative brother.

‘Fine by me,’ said Violet, carefully putting her napkin back on the table. ‘If anyone wants to borrow another layer then shout, it looks like rain this afternoon.’

It started raining while I stood behind Max waiting for the shooting to start again. Having defrosted enough to handle a knife and fork over lunch, my hands were stiff with cold again. Max stood, gun slung over his arm, cigarette dangling from his lips.

‘You all right?’ He glanced back at me.

‘Yes, yes, fine. Who needs hands anyway?’

‘You going back to London after this?’

‘No, I’m staying tonight. I haven’t had my interview with Jasper yet.’

He exhaled smoke into the air. ‘That’s brave. Have you talked much to their Graces?’

‘Who?’

‘The Duke and Duchess.’

‘No, not really.’ I squinted in the distance to see the Duke standing at the other end of the field. The Duchess had announced after lunch that she wasn’t coming out that afternoon because she had work to do in her hen house.

‘They’re barking,’ said Max, grinding his cigarette out in the mud with his boot. ‘Truly barking.’

‘I’ve noticed.’

‘Which is why Jasper is a bit… complicated sometimes.’

‘You’ve known him for ever?’

He nodded again. ‘We were at prep school together. Then the same house at Eton, until he got kicked out. Then Edinburgh University.’ He paused. ‘He’s been a good friend. Stood up for me at school when I came out. Not that my sexuality was a huge surprise to anyone. I mean, darling, look at me!’

I laughed. Max was wearing tweed, but also pink socks, a pink shirt, a yellow tie and a pink beanie.

‘So, he’s been a good friend,’ he carried on. ‘And, I know we all get a bit carried away sometimes…’

‘Carried away?’

‘Those pictures, after he broke up with Caz, are a case in point.’ Max raised his eyebrows at me. ‘Anyway, Jasper knows exactly who told the papers he’d broken it off with her, who told the photographers where he was that night. But he’s not going to say anything. He’s too honourable.’

There was a bang down the line and a pheasant dropped through the air towards the ground. ‘Right, here we go again. Time to concentrate,’ said Max, turning round and lifting his gun.

Back at the castle there was tea. The sort of tea you read about in a Dickens novel. Sandwiches, sausage rolls, fruitcake, shortbread, tea in actual teapots. Also, port. Port! In miniature wine glasses! Joe and I put away a couple of cheap bottles of Pinot Grigio from Barbara’s shop almost every night, but we didn’t drink as much as this lot. The Duke’s blood must be 93 per cent alcohol, I reckoned, watching him drain another glass of the syrupy red liquid.

After half an hour or so of standing on the fringes of the drawing room, defrosting my hands yet again on a teacup, Jasper’s friends started leaving and I snuck out gratefully to my room. I then ran a hot bath with a good few slugs from an ancient-looking bottle of hyacinth bath oil I found in the bathroom cupboard. Sylvia Plath once said that a hot bath cured everything, which I’d always thought slightly ironic, because poor Sylvia then went and killed herself. But I needed a bath to help collect my thoughts. The evening dinner promised to be a sort of cross between Downton Abbey and Coronation Street, while everyone politely ate their soup. Or drank their soup. What does one do with soup? Anyway, everyone would be doing something with their soup and discussing the day while bad tempers seethed underneath. Maybe soup would be thrown.

Because nobody in this house, this castle, rather, seemed able to move without some form of alcohol in their hand, Ian had sent me upstairs with something called a ‘hot toddy’. A few fingers of whisky, some hot water and a teaspoon or so of honey, he’d explained. ‘It’ll warm you up,’ he’d said.

I swirled it around in its glass, splashing hot, oily water over the side of the bath. It burned my throat going down.

My phone suddenly vibrated on the bed, so I climbed out of the bath, wrapped myself in a scratchy towel, picked it up and lay – steaming – on the narrow little mattress. It was Lala again.

How’s it going, Pols? Do you like Jaz? Send my love to everyone. Don’t forget the make-up thing Xxxx

I quickly typed out a reply.

All good, don’t worry. I’ll report back on Monday xxxx

Still hot and damp from the bath, I then stood up to heave myself into the floor-length dress Legs and Lala had insisted I wear. No tights, because they were common apparently. I looked in the full-length mirror. A ropey Twenties flapper girl looked back at me. But it would have to do. And somehow I needed to walk downstairs in the ridiculous heels they’d given me, so high they looked like they might give me vertigo.

I picked up my phone again and checked the time. Nearly seven o’clock. I needed to find the drawing room where Ian had told me the family gathered for drinks. More drinks! And I still hadn’t sat down to interview Jasper yet. I’d scribbled some more notes on my phone – his penchant for Van Morrison, his habit of constantly brushing his hair from his eyes, Max’s comment about him being ‘honourable’ – but I needed Jasper on record about his relationships. I needed him to open up a bit. I couldn’t come all this way and report back to Peregrine with so little. Maybe more drinks would help, I thought, as I closed the bedroom door behind me and inched down the stairs like a wobbly drunk, clutching at the banister. A grandfather clock ticked gently from below, but otherwise the house was silent. Ian’s instructions for finding the drawing room had been along these lines: ‘Come downstairs, turn left and walk fifty yards down the corridor, turn right into another corridor, click your heels three times and the drawing room will be on your right-hand side.’

The sound of smashing glass, followed by a high-pitched scream gave me a clue. It was exactly the sort of high-pitched scream that might come from an angry and potentially violent duchess.

‘WE ARE ALL HAVING FUCKING DINNER TOGETHER, ELEANOR, I MEAN IT.’

Another high-pitched scream. I froze outside the door. Rude to walk in on a row. But quite rude to stand out here listening to it, also. I wondered if I should hobble back upstairs again. But I could already feel a blister coming up on my little toe from those wretched heels. I was hovering like this in the hall, as if playing a private game of musical statues, when I heard a small cough behind me.

‘Polly, there you are,’ said Ian. ‘Follow me and let’s get you another drink.’ He swept past, carrying a silver tray with several Martini glasses on it.

‘Really?’

‘Absolutely, nothing to worry about,’ he said, pushing the door open.

The Duchess was standing beside the fireplace, still in her shooting clothes. The Duke was sitting in a large red armchair. Inca walked towards me and shoved his wet nose into my crotch.

‘Do get your bloody dog to behave,’ said the Duchess, huffily.

‘That’s all right,’ I said, brushing smears from Inca’s wet nose off the three-thousand-pound dress.

‘Very kind of you to dress so wonderfully, Polly, but we’re terribly relaxed here,’ said the Duke, who was wearing a blue shirt and electric red cords with a pair of velvet slippers. ‘Ian, what are we having for dinner?’

‘I think Chef’s doing mushroom soufflé, followed by roast partridge and then rhubarb syllabub, Your Grace. And there’s some cheese, if you’d like?’

‘Yes, we simply must have cheese,’ the Duke said gravely.

‘Well, if you’ll forgive me,’ said the Duchess, ‘I’m going to go and get changed and then go out. So, I’m afraid I won’t be joining you for dinner, Polly, but my husband and children will look after you.’ She glared at the Duke and stalked out, slamming the door behind her.

‘Drink, Polly?’ asked the Duke. ‘I’m going to have another one. A strong one, I think. Bugger the doctors.’

After its warlike beginning, dinner was almost disappointingly peaceful. Jasper, the Duke, Violet and I sat at one end of a vast mahogany table in the dining room, the light from several silver candlesticks flickering off the dark green walls and an eight-foot stuffed polar bear casting a long shadow along the room at the other end of the table. It was his grandfather’s, the Duke told me, one of forty-six polar bears brought back as a trophy from one of his hunting expeditions in the Arctic in 1906.

There was no shouting. No Duchess. Violet (in jeans and a t-shirt) talked about her horses, the Duke generally talked about the animals he’d killed, Jasper (in jeans and a collared blue shirt) quietly fed Bovril scraps of partridge. I felt excruciatingly out of place given that I was dressed as if I was off to a pre-war nightclub, but I kicked my shoes off under the table. I rubbed my feet together as the Duke asked me questions about London.

‘Far too many people in London,’ he said, wiping his mouth with his napkin at the end of dinner and standing up. He then announced he needed to walk Inca and Violet said she wanted to have a bath. Which left Jasper and me sitting at one end of the table, candles still burning and Ian humming while removing bowls and dirty napkins.

‘Another bottle?’ Ian asked.

‘I think so, don’t you?’ replied Jasper, pushing his chair back from the table and stretching his legs out in front of him. ‘OK, Polly, let’s get this over with.’

‘Get what over with?’

‘The interview, our little chat. What do you want to know about me and this madhouse?’

‘Oh, I see. OK. You call it a madhouse?’

‘What else would you call it? My father is a Victorian whose dearest wish is that he’d fought in the Boer War. My mother is happiest pottering about in the hen house with her friend, the gamekeeper.’

‘Ah. So, that’s…’

Jasper raised an eyebrow at me.

‘… common knowledge?’

‘Desperately common. The whole village knows about it. It’s been on and off for years. As long as I can remember. I don’t mind so much but I think Violet probably does. So, instead, she thinks of horses from morning till night.’

‘Hang on, hang on, can I record this?’ I pulled my phone out of my pocket and waved it at him.

He smiled at me. ‘Ah my inquisitor. I didn’t realize I was doing an interview for Newsnight.’

‘You’re not. But I quite need to record it. Can I?’ I held my phone up again.

‘’Course. I will say lots of immensely intelligent things.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ I said, fiddling with my phone to make sure it was recording. ‘And what about you?’

‘What do you mean “What about me?”’

‘Are you as mad as everyone else?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’m the sanest of the lot.’ He smiled again and swept his hair out of his eyes.

‘What about your break-up? What about those photos?’

‘What photos?’

‘The ones in the paper.’

He looked straight into my eyes. It was unnerving, as if he could see directly into my brain. A sort of posh Paul McKenna. ‘I don’t want to talk about Caz,’ he replied. ‘She’s a sweet girl. It just wasn’t right. Or I’m not right…’ He trailed off. ‘And those photos… All right, so occasionally I behave badly and let off a bit of steam. I go out and I behave like an idiot. But I don’t think being photographed stumbling out of a club is the worst thing in the world.’

He leant closer, shifting in his chair, still looking into my eyes. ‘Forgive me, Polly, for I have sinned.’

I burst out laughing. ‘Nice try. But you can’t charm your way out that easily.’

‘Fine.’ He sat back again, reached across the table for the wine and filled our glasses up. ‘OK, go on, ask me anything.’

I raised an eyebrow at him. ‘I’m trying to work you out.’

‘That’s not a question.’

‘I’m just trying to work out whether the joking is a front.’

‘A front?’

‘Like a mask. Covering up something more serious. You joke a lot.’

‘What did you expect?’

I frowned. ‘I’m not sure. You to be more cagey, more defensive.’

‘You expected me,’ he began, ‘to be a cretin in red trousers who couldn’t spell his own name?’

‘Well, maybe a bit. I mean, er, some of your friends at lunch, for example.’ I was thinking about Barny.

‘Yes. Most of them are bad, aren’t they? But…’ He shrugged. ‘They’re my friends, I’ve known them since school. And they don’t mean to be such thundering morons. They were just born like that.’

‘And you weren’t?’

‘No. I’m different.’ He grinned.

‘How?’

‘OK. I know there’s all this…’ He threw his arm out in front of him and across the room. ‘But sometimes I just want something normal. A normal family which doesn’t want to kill each other the whole time. A normal job in London. A normal girlfriend, frankly, who doesn’t look like a horse and talk about horses and want to marry me so she can live in a castle and have more horses.’

‘Oh, so you do want a girlfriend?’ I sensed this was the moment to push him a bit harder, to try to unpick him. ‘You want a proper relationship?’

He looked at me again, straight-faced. ‘Who’s asking?’

‘I am,’ I persevered. It was tricky, this bit, quizzing someone about their most personal feelings. But Peregrine wanted quotes on Jasper’s love life, so I needed him to talk about it. I needed a bit of sensitivity from the most eligible man in the country, a chink in his manly armour.

‘So, OK, you’re single again,’ I pressed on, ‘and I know you don’t want to talk about Lady Caroline… Caz… but what’s the deal with all the women?’

His wine glass froze in mid-air, before he placed it back down on the table. ‘Polly, I can’t believe it. “All the women” indeed. Who’s told you that?’

‘OK, so I know you dated Lala, briefly, and I know about a few others. The rumours about you and that Danish princess, last year, for example?’

Jasper grimaced in his seat. ‘Clara. I had dinner with her once and that was it. Terrible sense of humour. She didn’t laugh at any of my jokes.’

‘All right, the photos of you and Lady Gwendolyn Sponge?’

‘Nothing to it. Our parents are old friends.’

‘Who was that one you went skiing with last year then?’

He frowned at me.

‘You were photographed laughing on a chairlift together.’

His face cleared. ‘Oh, Ophelia. Yes. She’s a darling. But about as bright as my friend Bovril.’

Under the table, Bovril thumped his tail at the sound of his name.

‘Fine. But I imagine there have been… many more.’

He sighed. ‘Many more. I mean honestly, who makes up this nonsense?’

‘So it’s rubbish? All those tales about the legendary Jasper Milton are nonsense?’

‘You, Little Miss Inquisitor, are teasing me. And anyway, what does my personal life really matter to you?’ He looked at me with a straight face. ‘Why are you blushing?’

I put my hand up to my cheek. ‘I’m not. It’s all this wine.’

‘Oh. I thought it might be because I’m flirting with you.’

‘Is this you flirting? I’m amazed you get anyone into bed at all.’

He laughed. ‘Touché.’ And then he brushed his hair to the side, out of his eyes, again. And just for a second, literally for a second, I promise, I wondered what it would be like to be in bed with him, my own fingers in his hair. But then I thought about Lala and told myself to have a sip of water. I couldn’t go around the place fantasizing about my interview subjects. Kate Adie would never do that. I tried to get back to the point.

‘Do you think you’ll settle down though? Find someone? Get married? Have children? Do all that?’

He sighed again and sat back in his seat. ‘Maybe. I don’t know. How does one know? Do you know?’

‘This isn’t about me.’

He laughed. ‘See? You don’t know either. It’s not that easy, is it?’

‘What isn’t?’

He shrugged. ‘Relationships, life, getting older and realizing things can be more complicated than you thought.’

‘You feel hard done by?’

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That’s not what I’m saying at all. In the great lottery of life, as my father is fond of saying, I know I’ve done pretty well. But do you know what? Maybe, sometimes, I don’t want to take over this whole place. I don’t want to be told how lucky I am because I get to devote my whole life to a leaky castle and an estate that needs constant attention and I don’t want to be in the papers falling out of a club. But that doesn’t mean that I know what I do want.’

I stayed quiet and glanced up at a portrait of the sixth Duchess of Montgomery, a fat, pale lady in a green dress looking impassively at us from the wall. I looked from the painting to Jasper, who suddenly smiled at me.

‘What’s funny?’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Me, sitting here, talking to you about how terribly hard my life is. Come on, let’s have more wine and you keep asking me all your clever questions.’ He reached for the bottle and filled up our glasses again.